Let us try some napkin math. How thick does a cable need to be to move that much energy in that amount of time without overheating or being too heavy for a user to carry and plug into their car. Let's say 100KWh battery, to be charged at 99% efficiency via a 99% efficient DC-DC converter in 10 minutes. That is a rate of 600 KW. Current HV chargers use 600volts, so that is 1000A current. 0000 gauge wire is rated for 302 amps, so we'll use four such wires for VCC and four for GND, thus 8 total. That is eight wires, 0.46 inches diameter each. Must be heavy and unbendable, but let's persevere. Copper's density is 8.96 g/cm^3. This cable assembly will thus weigh 11.7 kilograms (and that is without insulation) Given copper's resistance (0.046 ohms per 1000 feel of length) at 0000 gauge, our cable assembly will be shedding ~24W of heat simply conducting this power. Toasty for user hands... I cannot even fathom the kind of connector required to allow for this current AND specced for thousands of insertion/removals. Contact areas in connectors are a constant issue, and here it will be even more so.
You'll also need to bend 8 half-inch-thick copper wires to plug/unplug this... I am not sure many people are ready for the force that will require. Also copper tends to break if you bend it a lot, so you'll need some other kind of conductor that bends, which means it will conduct less well, which means it will be thicker and heavier...
The alternative is a lighter cable with active cooling and higher losses. This has issues too (failure of cooling can snowball into a fire quite fast, coolant leaks are no fun, etc)
Now, back to our 99% efficient DC-DC converter. It will be shedding 6KW of heat, good luck cooling this, the battery charging at 99% efficiency will also be shedding 6KW of heat...same issue...
Basically, i am sure a small such battery can indeed charge in 10 minutes in the lab (~a 6C charge rate), and that is VERY cool, but moving 100KHw safely in ten minutes from anywhere to anywhere near live humans is a nontrivial engineering difficulty.
EDIT:
why not higher voltage? arcing, insulation material limits, cracking, rain, costs
Cable weight seems irrelevant if the user is not handling it. For instance, the cable is raised and attached to the vehicle from below while the user remains seated inside.
that is an option, but that is not how things operate now. this introduces other difficulties. We do not have space for 30 different charging stations which each has a different plug for bottom of 30 different cars. This will not scale.
If the bottom of the car is going to be armoured anyhow can't we use plates there to transfer the charge? the problem there would probably be dealing with dirt and other contaminants.
Let's consider for a second though. With the size savings of HV wire you now have room for a _lot_ of nice insulation that could last a long time. Arcing would not be a problem if you don't do live disconnects/reconnects. Rain would not be a problem with extra insulation. If arcing does occur this could be detected and power interrupted for safety, and a faulty cable replaced.
This is Toyota. I doubt they'll target 100KWh batteries to start (though that's probably table stakes for when this will actually debut beyond prototypes).
If we reduce to something small but prototype ready (20KWh) and walk back their 10m to be "10m to 80% SOC" then the numbers are surely doable with our current tech.
What happens if you move to, say, 2kV? Higher differences in potential create bigger risks of arcing, and need thicker insulation. Can this be mitigated in connector design? Or is this just considered too risky to be anywhere near people?
I realize this doesn't address the heat shedding of the converter or battery.
It's 500 kW, you started at 600kW, not 1000 kW. They are absolutely going to have active cooling.
$4,000 is high enough I guess, but it matters more how much it costs per charge delivered (which depends on how much it is used and how long it lasts and so on).
Current Teslas can charge at up to 250kW using 480V DC at 520 amps. Efficiency is somewhere between 90-95%, so that's around 10kW of heat that the car has to dump. The car's cooling system runs through the battery pack, allowing it to pump liquid through the battery, then run it through the radiator to get rid of waste heat. IIRC, Tesla plans to increase charging rates in the future by using liquid cooled charging cables. They also have a Megacharger in the works for their semi truck.
Charging at 600kW doesn't sound easy, but it seems possible with current technology.
Wow, really nice to see it broken down like that. What if there was some inductive solution with a giant plate (or plates) that would center itself under the car?
American Superconductor sells wire for $200 per kiloamp per metre. It would worth it getting a lighter superconducting cable given it wouldn't need cooling.
I've worked on very high current automotive applications in the past. While you raise some valid points, there are generally solutions to them. I've found its best to think of these things on a unit level - which is why so many battery characteristics are quoted in that way. If you can think of solutions for how to get around these issues for a single battery on a bench, there tend to be tractable ways to scale them.
Heat dissipation is one of the only things that doesn't scale linearly. 6kw sounds like a lot of power, but over 10 minutes, you are only talking about 1kwh of energy - about enough to boil 10 liters of water. Given the mass of the 100kwh battery, a large fraction of that could just be absorbed as temperature gain. If you assume the specific heat of iron (which is an underestimate) and the weight of the current 100kwh batteries, its about a 13 degree C change.
You're confusing energy and power which is leading you to the wrong conclusion. 6KW is 6KW of power. Over 10 minutes it's 1KWh of energy but typically you only care about instantaneous heat dissipation, which is power.
I think all of my units are correct. The primary point of the second paragraph was that the kind of analysis you are pointing to is inappropriate here. Thinking of this from a server heat-sinking perspective isn't helpful because the car side of the system doesn't have to operate indefinitely in steady state and is a large thermal mass.
Why assume this has to be a traditional cable. I'm imagining something in the middle of the car park that latches on to the bottom of the car. Maybe it could be 10 charging cables in a base that rises up which gives you the amp rating without massive copper strands.
Let's not charge the whole battery via a single point. Real batteries tend to charge groups of cells, or individual cells, separately anyway.
Let's have 4 cables, or maybe 6 cables, charging separate sub-batteries. Since the surface to mass ratio grows as mass decreases, passive cooling becomes more viable. The mass of each cable also becomes manageable. Of course, now you need to have several connectors on the car, likely under a dedicated retractable panel.
Cars aside, I'd apprentice a phone that can charge in 10 minutes, even if it needed to be under a fan during that.
The only thing that solves is the cabling issue, which quite frankly is the easy part of charging. You can always throw a larger connector, liquid cooling, etc at the problem. You're still going to charge them all the same way. The amount of heat generated by charging the battery would remain exactly the same, which is the biggest limitation.
Yeah, that's absolutely not true. Ambient air cooling for batteries is not enough when you're talking about ridiculously fast charging. Tesla's implementation has the AC running full blast (with radiator fans going full tilt) when supercharging even at the 140kW rate.
Getting the heat out of batteries is the hard part. And if you can, then keeping up with the heat generated is hard too.
As long as the voltage is high enough the amperage can be made entirely bearable.
10MW (about 14000 hp) can be moved with just 100 amps at 100kv. Most houses have something like 100 amp service from the power company. At 1000kv that's only 10 amps. 10MW for 10 min is about 1500kwh or enough to charge some 15 teslas approx to full.
The power levels you're talking about are big compared to household stuff, but kind of a joke compared to industrial processes.
Why copy the UX of a gas pump, maybe we can go back to the luxury of staying in your car while the pump is operated by an employee/robot -- pop the charge port open and the "pump" steers itself and locks in.
Thought I saw a Jalopnik article about Bentley or Rolls Royce inventing that exact thing, but I can't find it now. The idea being, if you're a billionaire, you don't want to do something low class like plugging in your car.
You can't have a 10kV or 100kV charging station being handled by the general public to charge their cars! That kind of voltage needs specialised equipment and is extremely dangerous.
There's no such thing as a consumer grade 11KV insulated cable.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a cable. It could be rigid. You could even have a platform which moves the car up to the charger. I could see some sort of telescoping arm made of teflon though.
Back of the envelope calculation to charge 100KWh battery in 10 minutes is about 750A [1] assuming 100% efficiency at 800V (back of the envelope optimism). Tesla Superchargers are already capable of 800A and Porsche is already using 800V. So it doesn't seem that much crazier than what we're already doing.
That's not as bad as I thought. There are already water-cooled CC2 charging cables that can handle 500A as long as the radiator system is up to the task. Hopefully by 2024 we'll get there.
Yes, it’s a lot. But, people are going to have to get used to the idea of large voltages and anperages, in the same way that we don’t really worry about Fay to day handling of large volumes of highly explosive liquid (petroleum).
Leaking a few drops of gasoline probably won't do any damage. Shorting or arcing 800V is several levels of "nope" above that. You can be dead in a fraction of a second.
Ehhh that is not a fair comparison... if you get some petroleum on your hand there is no immediate danger as long as you are not near an open flame. Even if you do manage to light yourself on fire you have a decent chance of surviving.
If you get some kilovolts backed by 100 amps on your hands you are pretty much instantly dead.
Every day since you were born you have been near enough electricity to kill you instantly. We have good safety measures in place already after working with it for over a century. Petroleum is no different in that sense. Fuses are pretty good at protecting us. The major difference is that when someone crashes into a gas station lots of people can die from the explosion. If someone crashes into a charging station that’s just not the case.
My point is, we are happy to deal with dangerous and deadly things in our everyday life, why is this any different?
Japan’s 20 billion subsidy seems very low for the entire industry. I also don’t know if Toyota’s serious about mass production infrastructure needed to ship EVs (seriously).
Tesla is serious, and they are having trouble ramping up. These companies are not as serious, so how do they ever expect to ramp up when things get super serious?
Will wait and see, but these companies are in jeopardy of getting dusted unless they start shipping something this year, like the Ford Mach E.
Toyota is in a much better position than E.U. or U.S. manufacturers, except for Tesla.
In the early 00's, the EU introduced emmissions regulations focused on Carbon, which didn't take sulphur into account. That's why Volkswagen and others like Mercedes focused so heavily on small diesel turbo engines, and explains the 2005-2010 or so diesel vehicle boom.
American manufacturers mostly just made big gas sonking vehicles running on petrol
Japanese manufacturers developed the Prius and other hybrid-electric products and were early to the game. Remember that the Toyota Prius Hybrid Electric vehicle was released in 1997. 1997! They currently sell four million units a year of Prius alone, and definitely have the knowledge + capacity to mass produce EV's
Explain Toyota's fascination with hydrogen fuel-cells. I loved my 2000s era Prius for what it was. I have lost any hope Toyota can catch up with Tesla now.
Battery tech wasn't that good back then. I think the consumer electronics battery boom (i.e. putting batteries in cellphones, laptops, etc) has advanced the tech considerably. Not my area of expertise though
I think the bigger risk is in the self driving component. If Tesla or another company pull this off, catchup could take 10+ years for other companies.
All else remaining equal who will buy a car you have to drive when you can avoid it, not least to add taxi, trucking and delivery service fleet purchases.
In addition as this market progresses I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace so quality of system will be huge. Not many are going to buy the cars that have 3x the accidents or too many famous mess ups.
Batteries are important but if I was an auto manufacturer the self driving component would keep me up at night.
> I think the bigger risk is in the self driving component.
What self driving component? TFA is about batteries.
If you mean, self driving is a bigger competitive advantage, and that's a bigger risk to Toyota/Japan Inc... well, no.
Tesla sold 0.5M vehicles last year and is having trouble scaling up. The total addressable market is over 100M vehicles per year, and self driving isn't going to be a factor in most people's purchase decisions for at least a decade. (More cars are sold in Asia than in the USA.)
> I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace.
Accidents are reduced by advanced vehicle safety systems: "self stopping", not self driving. Those systems can be fitted--even retrofitted--to any vehicle. [Edit: and they are being fitted to more and more vehicles.] This is one of the most sad and tired arguments for self driving.
I've always been bearish on self driving tech ever being adequate, but you bring up a point I haven't heard before, how many people actually want their car to drive itself? I mean I love radar cruise in a traffic jam, but having to drive my car actually is not a problem.
> Tesla sold 0.5M vehicles last year and is having trouble scaling up.
Tesla’s CAGR on number of vehicles produced from 2014 to 2020 has been 55%.
> “To put this number in perspective, Microsoft first broke $3 billion in sales in fiscal year 1993, generating $3.7 billion in revenue. ...Six years later Microsoft did $19.7 billion in revenue, which was a CAGR of 32.1%.”
Sustaining 55% CAGR for 6 years after hitting $3 billion is mind-numbing face-melting software monopoly level growth beyond what even M$FT achieved in its glory days.
It was thought this level of compound annual growth was simply just beyond the realm of possibility in the automotive sector, let alone the EV automotive sector.
Obviously this is what we all want to hear. I just think there should have been iterations on the Prius by now that kept pushing what it means to be an EV. Fuel efficiency and MPG should no longer be in our dictionary.
Volkswagen (the Group [1]) was very late to the EV game, yet in 2020 they sold 231,600 EVs [2]. About the same numbers as Tesla in 2018 (254,530 EVs). So they are only two years late. We will see if they manage to catch up, but they are certainly planning to.
I agree that Japanese auto makers are not yet very serious in all this. I shall know, I was in the market for an EV and bought an hybrid because I didn't find anything in my price range, and the charging infrastructure in Japan is still severely lacking.
Maybe it's because they are king in hybrid technology? So don't want/feel the need to switch. Cars are not a social network, it's the opposite of a winner take all market, so it probably doesn't matter much if they are not early in the market.
On the software side if Tesla masters the self-driving car aspect then it's a completely different story. On the other hands if the technology comes from Apple or Alphabet, I think all car makers will be able to access the technology. Especially if it's Alphabet.
[1] Volkswagen Group includes the brands Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche.
> In the 1970s, researchers attempted to create rechargeable fluoride batteries using solid components, but solid-state batteries work only at high temperatures, making them impractical for everyday use. In the new study, the authors report at last figuring out how to make the fluoride batteries work using liquid components—and liquid batteries easily work at room temperature.
But OP mentions solid state batteries.
This is not my field so I might just be misunderstanding what I'm reading.
Here's an announcement from Toyota last year with claims of a major battery breakthrough Real Soon Now™[1] "It is still unclear just how far the prototype tested in Kyoto is from series production."
I hope this works. Toyota has a good reputation. But the history of battery announcements is so disappointing. If this came with "and you can order the development kit battery now", it would be more convincing.
I'd like to see a 1, 5 and 10 years ago in battery announcements column somewhere that publishes battery announcements.
look Tesla's battery factory in China is in complete shambles. Porsche, hyundai, samsung, apple (hyundai collab), honda, toyota, vw, mercedes, audi are ALL after Tesla's pie and now the automotive cartel are going to push out Tesla.
I'm sorry this rustles the jimmies of Tesla shareholders and Elon Musk's fanboys. I got nothing against him but no early mover in automotive industry have ever survived in the long run: Ford, GM.
You know which company bet the farm on the continued generosity of low interest rates and government grants? Porsche in the 1970s. They eventually suffered a huge setback when the capital markets dried up.
Tesla has had a good run but you can't downvote away reality, SWOT analysis, and the fact that they have never made a profit on the cars they sold if you discounted tax credit and loan relief.
Jim Chanos is always right but not always profitable.
> no one has a viable alternative that's not vapor.
you underestimate the manufacturing capabilities of automtotive giants with far longer history at mass scale production of cars.
look theres' nothing special about electric cars. they are mostly just battery + chasis + motor. It's just not 2016 anymore, they've all been quietly acquiring the know how and waiting for the battery before making their end game chess move.
Let's keep the personal attacks to a minimum please. I can't even have a conversation on HN anymore without getting flagged by people who can't handle criticisms or fear their narrative coming under attack.
I get it. You bought Tesla stock, you made money, you are smart and everybody who drives ICE car are dumb. However, that still has nothing to do with how Tesla has never made a profit on its cars. Jim Chano is NOT wrong on this and lots of people overlook at this simple accounting trickery.
Disclaimer I own no TSLA, nor have I even purchased any shares, options or other derivatives as of this date aside from potentially 401k mutual funds (kinda wish this wasn't the case).
That said, I simply don't think things have changed in the past 10 years such that an "automotive giant" is ready to out-tech Tesla. I do think Apple may be able to do it but I wonder what their motive would be in doing so, as margins are much lower in auto than computing.
I did not intend my response as a personal attack; your reasoning (and verbiage) just seemed derivative, that's all.
So, I think it’s important to not overlook the fact that we are here today talking about EVs because Tesla was a leader in this space.
No other car company took this initiative with their decades of experience. I believe the the current crop of auto makers would have pushed for more fuel efficient ICE cars in the new green era.
Toyota is not even revamping their Prius in any capacity to stay with the trends. I need to see this ‘flip the switch when we need to’ behavior to believe they truly can snap their fingers and flip the switch.
>you underestimate the manufacturing capabilities of automtotive giants with far longer history at mass scale production of cars.
I've been hearing this since 2010. It's now 2021.
"Most experienced automakers race to put a car together in three years," said Angus MacKenzie, editor of Motor Trend magazine. "I can't see Tesla making more than a handful of these -- if any -- in 2012."
>look theres' nothing special about electric cars. they are mostly just battery + chasis + motor. It's just not 2016 anymore, they've all been quietly acquiring the know how and waiting for the battery before making their end game chess move.
"Faulty software set back a bid by the world’s largest car maker for electric-vehicle dominance"
The inherent nature of EVs require a ton of software development. Which is incredibly hard to nail and requires top talent. This is a monumental task for the auto incumbents. The only way to solve it is to start from scratch. Without the risk of alienating their OEM suppliers and system integrators.
> Let's keep the personal attacks to a minimum please. I can't even have a conversation on HN anymore without getting flagged by people who can't handle criticisms or fear their narrative coming under attack.
Maybe you should step back and reflect on the reason(s) why you're getting flagged.
> Jim Chano [sic] is NOT wrong on this and lots of people overlook at this simple accounting trickery.
So far, people like Jim Chanos and David Einhorn hemorrhaged money to the tune of $40B if you're not aware. Chanos also have (just very recently) closed his short position and converted them into PUT options.
It's fair to criticize Tesla's valuation, but they have recently become profitable, even excluding emissions credit sales.
The problem most other manufacturers have is that EV sales undercut their ICE sales, and also undercut their customer's most profitable segment, vehicle repair/service. It's going to be hard for them to transition from ICE to EV.
I don't know that I'd go so far as to say Tesla is screwed, but certainly massively over valued. I am baffled at how valuations seem to think all other manufacturers are just going to shrink away without any fight. I agree with the increasingly zealous misuse of downvoting; I had an account on another device which had every single comment downvoted; presumably I said something someone didn't like, but with no associated comment who knows.
I invite you to take a look at the post-IPhone world and how all other phone makers vanished up to that point.
Anyway, I do contemplate this particular shift in cars because of Tesla’s valuation. Why would Mazda keep existing if Tesla and Apple just out school them? There’s going to be some dead companies for sure. Where is Mazda on future tech?
I actually like the Mazda MX-30 EV prototype. But with a range of only 130 miles, it's a non-starter. It's interesting times for sure. I'm curious how the landscape will look like 10 years from now.
> Why would Mazda keep existing if Tesla and Apple just out school them? There’s going to be some dead companies for sure. Where is Mazda on future tech?
Mazda's CX5 handily outsells Tesla's Model Y.
I think the thing that a lot of people don't understand about Tesla, is that most people can't afford to spend $60,000 on a car. The Mazda CX5 has a MSRP of $25,270.
There's tons of people who buy things based on price, and battery prices aren't getting any cheaper.
On top of this, the CX5 competes in a segment where there's at least fifteen competitors, whereas the Model Y is (mostly) competing with the Jaguar I-Pace and Audi E-Tron.
The flagging is getting ridiculous now. As soon as you say something that the OGs dont agree with you get flagged and censored.
It's bizarre. How can people be this narrow minded on HN? Maybe they are not hungry anymore, they cashed in their stock options or made their acquisition and think they are infallible.
Look I love my Ferrari, its never going to lose value, its gone up since I bought it two years ago because as EVs become more popular, people are always going to value analogue.
There's a reason the manual version of the same F430 has a 100,000 USD premium. As EVs become no longer just Tesla, ICE cars are going to be even more sought after.
Tesla's electric cars are boring and Porsche's rendition is what the future holds. You can't compete with software alone, other manufacturers have largely caught up now.
As soon as you say something that the OGs dont agree with you get flagged and censored.
What you say is true, people often downvote things they don't agree with.
However, I think you're also getting downvoted because you're using words like "fanboys" and "screwed". People on HN tend to react very negatively to inflamatory language.
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
It remains to be seen whether Tesla will be able to leverage their access to cheap capital in a way that will allow them to corner the market on batteries. I think that's what this will all boil down to.
A lot of Apple's success with iPhones happened because they were able to dominate the market for the latest and greatest components, locking out competitors by simply buying up every scrap of cutting edge parts. If Tesla is able to leverage their capital and lock everyone else out of batteries, they might strangle the competition in a similar fashion. On the other hand, if Toyota or some other competitor can develop some game-changer battery technology and lock Tesla out, they could fold just as easily.
I have a new hyper-state battery in development. It will allow cars to go 1000km, charge from 0-100% in 5 minutes, and fits in a space the size of a small briefcase.
To convince the skeptics I will now provide exactly as much evidence for my claims as the linked article.
Often these "Well Sourced" rumors end up being off by years. While we all know Apple has a "Project Titan" when or even if there will be an end product is up in the air. The rumor sites can't even get a good estimate on the launch of Apple's AirTag/ location tracker things and there have been traces in the code for much of a year.
When these get put in phones, people will upgrade far less often... that'll put more pressure on the smaller phone companies.
Anecdotal - all my friends upgrade for more batter life or better camera. CPU / OS updates don't really bother them.
Good! We need to stop manufacturing so much disposable shit.
Yes, the economy will take a hit. We need new ways of defining progress than "money spent" and "shit manufactured". There are other ways to define and provide value in a post-modern society.
So if we have 7.2 millions PEVs (all-electric + hybrid)[0] how does that compare to the 4.8 billion phone users (smart + feature)[1]? If we assume only 1 phone per person (and ignore how many are in landfills) that's 667 phones per electric vehicle. I wonder how that compares in terms of rare earth metal usage.
The lifecycle of a vehicle is probably ~2-20 times that of a phone so let's say a single magnitude. That gives us 6600 phones per vehicle lifetime. Granted - the smartphone market will stay within a magnitude (not everyone can be an HK taxi driver with 7 phones)
Now global EV adoption will increase by ~3 magnitudes by the time the market saturates and there might be a magnitude separating phone count from EVs.
Apple seems to be moving away from trying to sell more iphones and instead in to getting iphone users to buy more kinds of things. You now have AirPods, the Apple Watch, and a million other things which each can last quite a while but add up to what would have been a new phone every year.
Looking the past couple weeks it looks like the Oppo A72, Oppo A91, and the Moro G series have great battery life and reasonably good reputation. Better battery life that the big players flagship phones.
Unfortunately neither of them are IP rated, and I work in a terribly dust environment.
Got a moto g power. Big battery runs 1.5 to 2 days without charger time unless watching more than 2-3 hours of video. Fits my browsing and talking needs. Camera is pretty good to buy I barely use a phone camera.
I'll also endorse the Moto G series of which I've had the G1 (Sep '14), the G4 (Oct '16) and am now using the "Motorola One" (Jan '19) which is/was in almost the exact price bracket (200-230€) and they were/are all really good phones. Very good battery life, quite fast and long-lived. Makes it even less understandable in my mind how so many people all over the world think they absolutely have to have the newest and most expensive Apple thing every year or few months, spending multiples each year on phones/tablets of what I spend every few years (in the past the phone was either defective or gotten so slow daily use was like trying to walk through mud).
The G1 and the G4 after 2+ years of use and a whole bunch of updates (multiple! major Android versions) got really slow and one of them I dropped so the display had a crack horizontally right across the middle, it still worked for MONTHS like that until I decided to get a new phone.
All in all, reasonable price for a good long-lived product without all the clutter some phone suppliers bog down their Android versions with, i.e. nearly stock Android with some minor unintrusive additions (from what I can see in my apps list right now: an equalizer app with different automatically activated profiles, an optional Motorola product newsletter app and a diagnostics app to help with troubleshooting and hardware tests).
The fine print involves no direct timeline for a commercially available vehicle: "Nissan Motor plans to develop its own solid-state battery which will power a non-simulation vehicle by 2028."
"The production site, located at a research and development center in Saitama Prefecture, will be able to produce dozens of tons of solid electrolyte annually staring next year, enough to fulfill orders for prototypes."
"Toyota plans to be the first company to sell an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery in the early 2020s. The world's largest automaker will unveil a prototype next year."
Solid state batteries will be great, but we might not see them in vehicles on the street for many years.
This is spin. Toyota is very late to EV’s having bet a lot on Hydrogen. As you will see this “next-gen” battery will be in development for at least another 5 years and probably much longer before the $/kwh is at parity with lithium ion.
Thats also comparing against todays Lithium Ion batteries forget about any advancements happening in the next several years.
I agree. Toyota is reacting (woefully late) to EU announcements about banning or restricting the sale of ICE vehicles starting around 2030, with PR spin about a magical new technology that isn't even in pilot project stage.
Those (magical new untested technologies) always turn out to be manufacturable, reliable, durable and profitable, of course.
Yes, I don’t think the response is to regulations, but the fact that EVs have taken off while the Japanese carmakers have been placing massive bets on hydrogen which does not look as promising.
Huh? Didn't Toyota define EVs in the 2000s with the hybrid Prius? It became iconic, broke into practical use and the mass market, and led the way for things like the Tesla. They were innovators and disrupters, not late to it.
Toyota worked on EVs when they were unfashionable, impractical, and unlikely. And they made them work in spite of all that. Now people are talking about them like they're EV laggards. Madness.
Agree. They just didn't build it solely around one big battery without any ICE engine. Look, if you live in an apartment it most likely is impossible to charge and own an EV. That’s a huge market segment to not address. They can all comfortably buy hybrids though.
I don't get why range extenders aren't more popular. A little motorbike-size engine that you can fuel from any petrol station on the planet that can charge the battery overnight, not connected to the drive train and running at optimal RPM for the alternator.
Because electricity is ubiquitous. It’s literally everywhere. Some states have mandated apartment complexes accompanied EV owners, and with the Biden administration, I expect federal standards in short order.
It’s a policy problem, not a technology problem. Tesla has deployed an enormous fast charging network on their own dime, so it’s reasonable more can be done faster with government support (including mandating and funding EV chargers for apartment dwellers).
No one wants to charge their EV from a Honda generator at their apartment complex. If you’re a Tesla owner in an apartment with no apartment parking EV charger access, you pop over to a Supercharger once a week (which, while suboptimal, is equivalent to gas stations until EV chargers are more widely available).
Is that an idealistic statement, or a practical one?
Yes an electricity supply is available everywhere most people would want. Practical charging facilities, however, are not.
I frequently find myself in situations where I can get petrol very easily but cannot practically plug in anywhere. With a range extender I could run a very efficient little engine and reduce my emissions today.
My statements are pragmatic, based on the uptake of Tesla EVs in the marketplace versus consumers who want to drag a generator around with them to charge.
I quite often drive beyond the range of an EV, to a place where there are no chargers at all. If I could just have a little range extender motor that I could put petrol in and use to charge overnight, I could fully commit to EVs right now forever. But I can't yet. That little bit of pragmatism would make it all work. It'd even fit in the front cargo space of a Tesla!
But you can! Get a portable Honda generator [1] and plug into it with a mobile connector to charge (my Tesla can charge from a 120V 15a circuit, or a 220v dryer outlet). If that doesn’t provide you enough charge, find a surplus generator on a trailer [2] and haul it behind you with a hitch. If it’s a diesel, you can even run it on vegetable oil instead of petroleum.
When you’re not going to the boonies, you’re fully electric without dragging a generator with you, and can rely on charging stations.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but this isn't a reasonably well packaged solution for people to use. What's the security of the generator sitting outside my car all night? It needs to be an integrated solution.
Scroll down to jurisdictions banning fossil fuel car sales. It’s a problem only until the government no longer allows you to buy a petrol vehicle. Canada’s ban starts in 2040, although I expect that to be pulled forward to align with other jurisdictions targeting 2030.
> It’s a problem only until the government no longer allows you to buy a petrol vehicle.
Right, you're nailing it - it's a problem today. A problem we could solve today. By popping a range extender under the (currently empty!) bonnet of a Tesla. Then everyone could get an EV, figure out how to make it work right now, and be ready for the way forward.
Don't think about what we could be doing by 2030 - think about what we could achieve right now!
And it's not just about petrol - don't fixate on when petrol is phased out - it's about diesel as well.
(An unrelated problem is that EVs need more form factors, such as off-road vehicles, which Teslas don't currently do.)
You just don't need it. It's solving a non-problem.
Tesla is selling all of the cars they can make, and the people simply don't find themselves experiencing the range anxiety they imagine they will. The vast majority of them just plug in their cars when they get home and never, ever think about going to a gas station. It's not about 30 minutes at a charger vs 5 minutes at a gas station; it's about 5 minutes at a gas station vs 0 minutes.
That's 99% of the trips taken in a Tesla. For 99% of the rest, there are superchargers.
So your range extender is a lot of extra machinery in an otherwise mostly solid-state device. To a Tesla owner, it just feels dirty, the way a gas station always feels grimy. It wouldn't help them sell any extra cars because the limiting factor on their sales is how fast they can build them.
They're scaling up, and by the time the gas cars are phased out, the entire system will have shifted. There will be even more superchargers and even more solid options for those 1% of 1% of trips that it won't suffice for.
Meantime, Tesla owners already spend less time than gas car owners fueling their cars, because it happens while they sleep. They don't need a mechanical solution because it's already solved.
I agree. Those generators should also be optimized for optimal power output for exactly what the batteries need. It’d probably be more efficient than a larger engine in a traditional machine.
Mazda is working on a model with a range extender. BMW just took them out of their models, but they’re not quite the same segment.
Tbh I never want to own a full EV. Many in the suburbs or country can’t afford to wait 20 min at a charging station. Many of us like the idea of EV, but also drive 100-200 miles a day or in cold weather or mountains, etc (all of which reduces the range of EV)
No you can’t that’s the “range” if it’s sunny Southern California on flat terrain. And even that might only be 160 miles.
people regularly drive to cities which is like 300-400 miles round trip. They need to pull 1 ton in a truck. There’s snow on the road and no charging station, do you want to freeze?
I’m not saying we won’t get there, just saying right now hybrids (which I actually own) are the only real option for people outside of a metropolitan area (or if they just want to drive local, which is fine). Pacifica hybrids are great, they have 30 mile full battery power. Then switch to gas. I drive locally 90% is the time, but can still drive to the closest major city 160 miles away
I used to drive ~180 miles round trip a day for work. A Tesla wouldn’t have been able to pull that off. Particularly in cold weather in the hills. But even assuming there was a charging station at work (enabling the round trip) - I also regularly drove to other cities(weekends and such) that would be 300-400 miles away. There are no charging stations anywhere in between.
This was / is common in my area. My point is that a Tesla works well in many cases, particularly in densely populated regions. They work less well if you have to drive distances, carry a heavy load, and especially not if it’s more rugged. All the more true if you have kids, particularly young ones where a 20 min charging break is rough. Or running out of charge could be a problem.
Hybrids are really much better suited to these scenarios. I think EVs will get there, they’re always closing gaps, just right now less densely populated areas make less sense.
As a Bay Area resident, let me tell you: I have driven all over California and there are Tesla’s meeting me at each spot. You’re in the past with this take.
Like I said, we will get there. It’s really not there yet. I too lived in the Bay and regularly went down to San Diego. Much easier to do if you’re willing to take a couple 20 min breaks on the way (pretty normal). There are charging stations though. It’s always warm, roads are flat, etc
All I was saying is Tesla is good for what it is. It’s not well suited (today) for country or even some suburbs. For those instances hybrids are a better fit
If you live in the suburbs or country, there is no need to ever wait at a charging station since you presumably should be charging at your home. This is just like charging your phone at night, just on a bigger scale.
We don't wait at charging stations. We charge at home and or at work. The vast majority of people don't drive enough in a day to run out of range on a tesla.
Toyota had the first mass produced hybrid vehicle in 1997 with the Prius. Today, they have hybrid vehicles for all of their passenger cars, and class leading MPG in most of them. They are #1 in terms of sales volume for hybrid vehicles.
They have a fully sorted fuel cell vehicle in the Mirai, based upon technology that is no more expensive to produce than an ICE.
They are late to the game on EV's, but the entire market is still in its early days.
You can bet that once the battery technology becomes cheap enough to stuff into cars with Corolla price tags, Toyota will be doing it, and they will be the #1 seller of EV's in terms of sales volume.
> You can bet that once the battery technology becomes cheap enough to stuff into cars with Corolla price tags, Toyota will be doing it, and they will be the #1 seller of EV's in terms of sales volume.
Maybe. But you are assuming the cost of battery technology will be the same for everyone. Currently it seems like Tesla is about 3-5 years ahead of everyone in terms of price & performance. What happens if/ when[1] Tesla launches an EV at Corolla prices and Toyota is still waiting for battery prices to come down?
I think it's far more likely at this point that Tesla will have a $25k EV in the next 5 years than Toyota.
In the situation (Tesla and others) looks not a big problem for other manufacturers because Tesla can't fill all EV demands and not all people (especially outside US) like Tesla.
I don't think Tesla would have been possible if Toyota hadn't blasted the way for them. Before Toyota's work people didn't think any kind of EV was practical.
The classic business book on disruptive innovation, produced before the Prius existed, shows that people who cared actually knew better.
EVs were not viable until battery technology improved enough. Batteries have been improving about 7%/year. Based on those figures from the 1990s and an estimate of minimum acceleration, range, and recharge time to be acceptable on the road, EVs were predicted to become viable for the mass market around 2020.
Guess what. Those trends held and EVs became viable for the mass market around 2020. :-)
Hybrids and EVs are very different. And what you need to do to make one does not translate very well to the other.
Before either hybrids or EVs were commercially viable, The Innovator's Dilemma included a case study done for the car industry on the switch to electric. The case study concluded that, based on the history of disruptive innovation, the requirements of driving, and the trends in batteries, electric vehicles would become economically viable around 2020. It also concluded that traditional manufacturers would pursue hybrids but would have trouble moving into the EV market.
As a prior correlated example, shortly before steam became competitive for trans-oceanic travel, sailboat manufacturers briefly produced hybrid sail/steam ships. In so doing they made acceptable compromises to sail to allow for the reliability of steam near land. However none of the companies that did that survived into the steamship era.
In fact every detail of that case study has happened as predicted except that they predicted that EVs would start at the bottom of the market and move up, while Tesla started at the top and moved down. However the jury is still out on who will wind up winning the EV market - Tesla or one of the Chinese or Indian manufacturers who produce low-end EVs in higher quantity than Tesla. If it is China or India, then that case study will work out in every detail.
But the point remains. Designing an electric engine whose job is to be a boost to a gasoline engine, compromising both power and range, is not on a natural technological path to a pure electric vehicle. And history suggests that companies that go that route will have trouble when pressure comes to switch to the more natural technology.
Therefore Toyota's migration to hybrids is not only not a move to EVs, but it was both predicted and is suggestive that they would have trouble moving to pure EVs.
> Tesla or one of the Chinese or Indian manufacturers who produce low-end EVs in higher quantity than Tesla
I don't see Tesla ever becoming a gargantuan multinational carmaker giant like Toyota or GM - it's just not in their corporate ethos. I compare Tesla to Apple: they're technological leaders who set the benchmarks (and own the patents) but who also keep a relatively small and simple product matrix. There's loads of computer form-factors that Apple doesn't produce products for (e.g. rugged laptops, industrial control computers, "affordable" computers, and so on) - the demand for these products which are typically lower-margin are met by other manufacturers and I see Tesla being fine with this: let Toyota, GM, etc stress over meeting demand for a sub-$30k BEV while making hardly any profit.
I think the importance of self-driving / autonomous cars should also be considered. GM has Cruise, but Toyota, Ford, Honda, etc are either uninterested for some reason, or hoping Google or Apple will license them their Waymo or Titan system, or playing catchup very, very slowly - given Tesla is looking like they'll make their FSD an open-beta this year (and a public 1.0 release before the year's end, I hope!) that further widens their moat and with their current (overinflated, I admit) valuation that could see them buy-out a smaller carmarker to cement themselves should anything detrimental happen in the medium-term.
And he's been sticking to the roadmap. For example that blog post was the first public announcement that they would eventually produce a family sedan called the Model 3. And indeed they eventually produced a family sedan..and called it the Model 3.
Oh wow, I never saw that, but that's exactly what I saw they were doing and now everything makes sense.
Given they've been literally telegraphing their moves right-up-until the decision to do self-driving tech, I'm surprised bigger automakers haven't reacted at all until now, at which point they're lagging so far behind it's just depressing.
In the updated roadmap Elon realized that full autonomy will be ready before the 20 years that it takes to switch all current cars to electric, so it's more important than having the cheapest possible car.
> The government is putting together a fund of about 2 trillion yen ($19.2 billion) that will support decarbonization technology. Policymakers will consider using those funds to provide subsidies of hundreds of billions of yen that will fund the development of the new batteries.
As an aside, being able to do this kind of thing is one of the very few alleged benefits of Brexit. Will be interesting to see if they can actually execute on it.
Thanks. It's a strange article in general, especially given that it keeps popping up here.
The article makes a lot of claims (500km, 10 minute charge from 0-100%, reduced battery size/footprint) but it doesn't back up those claims or even say who is claiming them. Is it Toyota? A manufacturing partner? "people familiar with the matter"? The authors themselves based on general industry knowledge?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadYou'll also need to bend 8 half-inch-thick copper wires to plug/unplug this... I am not sure many people are ready for the force that will require. Also copper tends to break if you bend it a lot, so you'll need some other kind of conductor that bends, which means it will conduct less well, which means it will be thicker and heavier...
The alternative is a lighter cable with active cooling and higher losses. This has issues too (failure of cooling can snowball into a fire quite fast, coolant leaks are no fun, etc)
Now, back to our 99% efficient DC-DC converter. It will be shedding 6KW of heat, good luck cooling this, the battery charging at 99% efficiency will also be shedding 6KW of heat...same issue...
Basically, i am sure a small such battery can indeed charge in 10 minutes in the lab (~a 6C charge rate), and that is VERY cool, but moving 100KHw safely in ten minutes from anywhere to anywhere near live humans is a nontrivial engineering difficulty.
EDIT: why not higher voltage? arcing, insulation material limits, cracking, rain, costs
What about doubling the voltage?
I think it's doable
If we reduce to something small but prototype ready (20KWh) and walk back their 10m to be "10m to 80% SOC" then the numbers are surely doable with our current tech.
I realize this doesn't address the heat shedding of the converter or battery.
https://www.phoenixcontact.com/online/portal/us/?uri=pxc-oc-...
The power level is in active use on electric transit buses (using a charger that drops down onto contacts on the roof). The video here shows it:
https://new.abb.com/ev-charging/products/pantograph-down
$4,000 is high enough I guess, but it matters more how much it costs per charge delivered (which depends on how much it is used and how long it lasts and so on).
https://globetech.jp/products/standard-high-current-connecto...
They aren't very cheap though.
Charging at 600kW doesn't sound easy, but it seems possible with current technology.
Heat dissipation is one of the only things that doesn't scale linearly. 6kw sounds like a lot of power, but over 10 minutes, you are only talking about 1kwh of energy - about enough to boil 10 liters of water. Given the mass of the 100kwh battery, a large fraction of that could just be absorbed as temperature gain. If you assume the specific heat of iron (which is an underestimate) and the weight of the current 100kwh batteries, its about a 13 degree C change.
Let's have 4 cables, or maybe 6 cables, charging separate sub-batteries. Since the surface to mass ratio grows as mass decreases, passive cooling becomes more viable. The mass of each cable also becomes manageable. Of course, now you need to have several connectors on the car, likely under a dedicated retractable panel.
Cars aside, I'd apprentice a phone that can charge in 10 minutes, even if it needed to be under a fan during that.
Getting the heat out of batteries is the hard part. And if you can, then keeping up with the heat generated is hard too.
10MW (about 14000 hp) can be moved with just 100 amps at 100kv. Most houses have something like 100 amp service from the power company. At 1000kv that's only 10 amps. 10MW for 10 min is about 1500kwh or enough to charge some 15 teslas approx to full.
The power levels you're talking about are big compared to household stuff, but kind of a joke compared to industrial processes.
Don't those voltages leak like crazy across things which a normal person would consider as a safe insulator?
E.g. might some regular dirt on a plastic charging cable leak it into your hands?
Liquid nitrogen can be made from the air on-site if needed, and is a hell of a lot easier to handle then hundreds or thousands of volts.
There's no such thing as a consumer grade 11KV insulated cable.
https://www.schleich.com/en/product/high-voltage-cables-en/
I mean you would need some smarts to ensure the leads are never exposed when active but otherwise I don't see the issue.
[1] 100KWh * 1000(W/Kw) / 800V * 6 (10min/hr) = 750A
If you get some kilovolts backed by 100 amps on your hands you are pretty much instantly dead.
My point is, we are happy to deal with dangerous and deadly things in our everyday life, why is this any different?
Tesla is serious, and they are having trouble ramping up. These companies are not as serious, so how do they ever expect to ramp up when things get super serious?
Will wait and see, but these companies are in jeopardy of getting dusted unless they start shipping something this year, like the Ford Mach E.
In the early 00's, the EU introduced emmissions regulations focused on Carbon, which didn't take sulphur into account. That's why Volkswagen and others like Mercedes focused so heavily on small diesel turbo engines, and explains the 2005-2010 or so diesel vehicle boom.
American manufacturers mostly just made big gas sonking vehicles running on petrol
Japanese manufacturers developed the Prius and other hybrid-electric products and were early to the game. Remember that the Toyota Prius Hybrid Electric vehicle was released in 1997. 1997! They currently sell four million units a year of Prius alone, and definitely have the knowledge + capacity to mass produce EV's
All else remaining equal who will buy a car you have to drive when you can avoid it, not least to add taxi, trucking and delivery service fleet purchases.
In addition as this market progresses I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace so quality of system will be huge. Not many are going to buy the cars that have 3x the accidents or too many famous mess ups.
Batteries are important but if I was an auto manufacturer the self driving component would keep me up at night.
What self driving component? TFA is about batteries.
If you mean, self driving is a bigger competitive advantage, and that's a bigger risk to Toyota/Japan Inc... well, no.
Tesla sold 0.5M vehicles last year and is having trouble scaling up. The total addressable market is over 100M vehicles per year, and self driving isn't going to be a factor in most people's purchase decisions for at least a decade. (More cars are sold in Asia than in the USA.)
> I imagine accidents per km will become a huge purchase decision when self driving is more commonplace.
Accidents are reduced by advanced vehicle safety systems: "self stopping", not self driving. Those systems can be fitted--even retrofitted--to any vehicle. [Edit: and they are being fitted to more and more vehicles.] This is one of the most sad and tired arguments for self driving.
Not ideal for the environment, admittedly.
Tesla’s CAGR on number of vehicles produced from 2014 to 2020 has been 55%.
> “To put this number in perspective, Microsoft first broke $3 billion in sales in fiscal year 1993, generating $3.7 billion in revenue. ...Six years later Microsoft did $19.7 billion in revenue, which was a CAGR of 32.1%.”
Sustaining 55% CAGR for 6 years after hitting $3 billion is mind-numbing face-melting software monopoly level growth beyond what even M$FT achieved in its glory days.
It was thought this level of compound annual growth was simply just beyond the realm of possibility in the automotive sector, let alone the EV automotive sector.
So they are looking at 50k cars compared to 500k Tesla ships. This is something these car companies needed to start doing yesterday.
I agree that Japanese auto makers are not yet very serious in all this. I shall know, I was in the market for an EV and bought an hybrid because I didn't find anything in my price range, and the charging infrastructure in Japan is still severely lacking.
Maybe it's because they are king in hybrid technology? So don't want/feel the need to switch. Cars are not a social network, it's the opposite of a winner take all market, so it probably doesn't matter much if they are not early in the market.
On the software side if Tesla masters the self-driving car aspect then it's a completely different story. On the other hands if the technology comes from Apple or Alphabet, I think all car makers will be able to access the technology. Especially if it's Alphabet.
[1] Volkswagen Group includes the brands Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche.
[2] https://insideevs.com/news/465956/in-2020-volkswagen-group-s...
[1] https://techxplore.com/news/2018-12-battery-concept-based-fl...
From the article you linked:
> In the 1970s, researchers attempted to create rechargeable fluoride batteries using solid components, but solid-state batteries work only at high temperatures, making them impractical for everyday use. In the new study, the authors report at last figuring out how to make the fluoride batteries work using liquid components—and liquid batteries easily work at room temperature.
But OP mentions solid state batteries.
This is not my field so I might just be misunderstanding what I'm reading.
I hope this works. Toyota has a good reputation. But the history of battery announcements is so disappointing. If this came with "and you can order the development kit battery now", it would be more convincing.
I'd like to see a 1, 5 and 10 years ago in battery announcements column somewhere that publishes battery announcements.
[1] https://www.electrive.com/2020/08/14/toyota-developing-flour...
I'm sorry this rustles the jimmies of Tesla shareholders and Elon Musk's fanboys. I got nothing against him but no early mover in automotive industry have ever survived in the long run: Ford, GM.
You know which company bet the farm on the continued generosity of low interest rates and government grants? Porsche in the 1970s. They eventually suffered a huge setback when the capital markets dried up.
Tesla has had a good run but you can't downvote away reality, SWOT analysis, and the fact that they have never made a profit on the cars they sold if you discounted tax credit and loan relief.
Jim Chanos is always right but not always profitable.
I doubt Tesla keeps it's margins or perhaps even valuation, but no one has a viable alternative that's not vapor.
you underestimate the manufacturing capabilities of automtotive giants with far longer history at mass scale production of cars.
look theres' nothing special about electric cars. they are mostly just battery + chasis + motor. It's just not 2016 anymore, they've all been quietly acquiring the know how and waiting for the battery before making their end game chess move.
Let's keep the personal attacks to a minimum please. I can't even have a conversation on HN anymore without getting flagged by people who can't handle criticisms or fear their narrative coming under attack.
I get it. You bought Tesla stock, you made money, you are smart and everybody who drives ICE car are dumb. However, that still has nothing to do with how Tesla has never made a profit on its cars. Jim Chano is NOT wrong on this and lots of people overlook at this simple accounting trickery.
That said, I simply don't think things have changed in the past 10 years such that an "automotive giant" is ready to out-tech Tesla. I do think Apple may be able to do it but I wonder what their motive would be in doing so, as margins are much lower in auto than computing.
I did not intend my response as a personal attack; your reasoning (and verbiage) just seemed derivative, that's all.
I share the same sentiment. From my own observations, Apple might have a better shot than the incumbents.
No other car company took this initiative with their decades of experience. I believe the the current crop of auto makers would have pushed for more fuel efficient ICE cars in the new green era.
Toyota is not even revamping their Prius in any capacity to stay with the trends. I need to see this ‘flip the switch when we need to’ behavior to believe they truly can snap their fingers and flip the switch.
The bet is they can’t.
I've been hearing this since 2010. It's now 2021.
"Most experienced automakers race to put a car together in three years," said Angus MacKenzie, editor of Motor Trend magazine. "I can't see Tesla making more than a handful of these -- if any -- in 2012."
Source: https://money.cnn.com/2010/06/29/technology/tesla_ipo/index....
>look theres' nothing special about electric cars. they are mostly just battery + chasis + motor. It's just not 2016 anymore, they've all been quietly acquiring the know how and waiting for the battery before making their end game chess move.
"Faulty software set back a bid by the world’s largest car maker for electric-vehicle dominance"
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-volkswagens-50-billion-plan...
The inherent nature of EVs require a ton of software development. Which is incredibly hard to nail and requires top talent. This is a monumental task for the auto incumbents. The only way to solve it is to start from scratch. Without the risk of alienating their OEM suppliers and system integrators.
> Let's keep the personal attacks to a minimum please. I can't even have a conversation on HN anymore without getting flagged by people who can't handle criticisms or fear their narrative coming under attack.
Maybe you should step back and reflect on the reason(s) why you're getting flagged.
> Jim Chano [sic] is NOT wrong on this and lots of people overlook at this simple accounting trickery.
So far, people like Jim Chanos and David Einhorn hemorrhaged money to the tune of $40B if you're not aware. Chanos also have (just very recently) closed his short position and converted them into PUT options.
Sources:
[1] https://www.wraltechwire.com/2021/01/06/tesla-short-sellers-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/jim-chanos-is-no-longer-shor...
He's been wrong for 12 years (since Tesla IPO'd in 2010). What more conviction do you need?
The problem most other manufacturers have is that EV sales undercut their ICE sales, and also undercut their customer's most profitable segment, vehicle repair/service. It's going to be hard for them to transition from ICE to EV.
Anyway, I do contemplate this particular shift in cars because of Tesla’s valuation. Why would Mazda keep existing if Tesla and Apple just out school them? There’s going to be some dead companies for sure. Where is Mazda on future tech?
https://www.mazda.com/en/new-generation/mx-30/
Mazda's CX5 handily outsells Tesla's Model Y.
I think the thing that a lot of people don't understand about Tesla, is that most people can't afford to spend $60,000 on a car. The Mazda CX5 has a MSRP of $25,270.
There's tons of people who buy things based on price, and battery prices aren't getting any cheaper.
On top of this, the CX5 competes in a segment where there's at least fifteen competitors, whereas the Model Y is (mostly) competing with the Jaguar I-Pace and Audi E-Tron.
I thought they were getting dramatically cheaper every year?
It's bizarre. How can people be this narrow minded on HN? Maybe they are not hungry anymore, they cashed in their stock options or made their acquisition and think they are infallible.
Look I love my Ferrari, its never going to lose value, its gone up since I bought it two years ago because as EVs become more popular, people are always going to value analogue.
There's a reason the manual version of the same F430 has a 100,000 USD premium. As EVs become no longer just Tesla, ICE cars are going to be even more sought after.
Tesla's electric cars are boring and Porsche's rendition is what the future holds. You can't compete with software alone, other manufacturers have largely caught up now.
What you say is true, people often downvote things they don't agree with.
However, I think you're also getting downvoted because you're using words like "fanboys" and "screwed". People on HN tend to react very negatively to inflamatory language.
It remains to be seen whether Tesla will be able to leverage their access to cheap capital in a way that will allow them to corner the market on batteries. I think that's what this will all boil down to.
A lot of Apple's success with iPhones happened because they were able to dominate the market for the latest and greatest components, locking out competitors by simply buying up every scrap of cutting edge parts. If Tesla is able to leverage their capital and lock everyone else out of batteries, they might strangle the competition in a similar fashion. On the other hand, if Toyota or some other competitor can develop some game-changer battery technology and lock Tesla out, they could fold just as easily.
I have a new hyper-state battery in development. It will allow cars to go 1000km, charge from 0-100% in 5 minutes, and fits in a space the size of a small briefcase.
To convince the skeptics I will now provide exactly as much evidence for my claims as the linked article.
It's well known since 2014 that they have been working on Project Titan for a while and even hired former Ford, Tesla, and Mercedes-Benz employees.
I have no idea nor pretend to know the timeline. I just know that Apple is working on Project Titan for a while now.
Take your issue with the authors who wrote the articles.
Even when Apple formally announce a product, there’s still a possibility that it will get canned. Like AirPower.
Good! We need to stop manufacturing so much disposable shit.
Yes, the economy will take a hit. We need new ways of defining progress than "money spent" and "shit manufactured". There are other ways to define and provide value in a post-modern society.
The lifecycle of a vehicle is probably ~2-20 times that of a phone so let's say a single magnitude. That gives us 6600 phones per vehicle lifetime. Granted - the smartphone market will stay within a magnitude (not everyone can be an HK taxi driver with 7 phones)
Now global EV adoption will increase by ~3 magnitudes by the time the market saturates and there might be a magnitude separating phone count from EVs.
[0] https://evstatistics.com/2020/06/global-electric-vehicle-sto...
[1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...
Just print money until you make it.
Unfortunately neither of them are IP rated, and I work in a terribly dust environment.
The G1 and the G4 after 2+ years of use and a whole bunch of updates (multiple! major Android versions) got really slow and one of them I dropped so the display had a crack horizontally right across the middle, it still worked for MONTHS like that until I decided to get a new phone.
All in all, reasonable price for a good long-lived product without all the clutter some phone suppliers bog down their Android versions with, i.e. nearly stock Android with some minor unintrusive additions (from what I can see in my apps list right now: an equalizer app with different automatically activated profiles, an optional Motorola product newsletter app and a diagnostics app to help with troubleshooting and hardware tests).
"The production site, located at a research and development center in Saitama Prefecture, will be able to produce dozens of tons of solid electrolyte annually staring next year, enough to fulfill orders for prototypes."
"Toyota plans to be the first company to sell an electric vehicle equipped with a solid-state battery in the early 2020s. The world's largest automaker will unveil a prototype next year."
Solid state batteries will be great, but we might not see them in vehicles on the street for many years.
Thats also comparing against todays Lithium Ion batteries forget about any advancements happening in the next several years.
Those (magical new untested technologies) always turn out to be manufacturable, reliable, durable and profitable, of course.
Huh? Didn't Toyota define EVs in the 2000s with the hybrid Prius? It became iconic, broke into practical use and the mass market, and led the way for things like the Tesla. They were innovators and disrupters, not late to it.
Toyota worked on EVs when they were unfashionable, impractical, and unlikely. And they made them work in spite of all that. Now people are talking about them like they're EV laggards. Madness.
It’s a policy problem, not a technology problem. Tesla has deployed an enormous fast charging network on their own dime, so it’s reasonable more can be done faster with government support (including mandating and funding EV chargers for apartment dwellers).
No one wants to charge their EV from a Honda generator at their apartment complex. If you’re a Tesla owner in an apartment with no apartment parking EV charger access, you pop over to a Supercharger once a week (which, while suboptimal, is equivalent to gas stations until EV chargers are more widely available).
Yes an electricity supply is available everywhere most people would want. Practical charging facilities, however, are not.
I frequently find myself in situations where I can get petrol very easily but cannot practically plug in anywhere. With a range extender I could run a very efficient little engine and reduce my emissions today.
When you’re not going to the boonies, you’re fully electric without dragging a generator with you, and can rely on charging stations.
[1] https://powerequipment.honda.com/generators
[2] https://www.ebay.com/b/Industrial-Trailer-Mounted-Generators...
Now you've got it! People are demonstrably still going for the 'not this' option. They buy a petrol or diesel car instead of an electric one.
That's the problem.
Scroll down to jurisdictions banning fossil fuel car sales. It’s a problem only until the government no longer allows you to buy a petrol vehicle. Canada’s ban starts in 2040, although I expect that to be pulled forward to align with other jurisdictions targeting 2030.
Right, you're nailing it - it's a problem today. A problem we could solve today. By popping a range extender under the (currently empty!) bonnet of a Tesla. Then everyone could get an EV, figure out how to make it work right now, and be ready for the way forward.
Don't think about what we could be doing by 2030 - think about what we could achieve right now!
And it's not just about petrol - don't fixate on when petrol is phased out - it's about diesel as well.
(An unrelated problem is that EVs need more form factors, such as off-road vehicles, which Teslas don't currently do.)
Tesla is selling all of the cars they can make, and the people simply don't find themselves experiencing the range anxiety they imagine they will. The vast majority of them just plug in their cars when they get home and never, ever think about going to a gas station. It's not about 30 minutes at a charger vs 5 minutes at a gas station; it's about 5 minutes at a gas station vs 0 minutes.
That's 99% of the trips taken in a Tesla. For 99% of the rest, there are superchargers.
So your range extender is a lot of extra machinery in an otherwise mostly solid-state device. To a Tesla owner, it just feels dirty, the way a gas station always feels grimy. It wouldn't help them sell any extra cars because the limiting factor on their sales is how fast they can build them.
They're scaling up, and by the time the gas cars are phased out, the entire system will have shifted. There will be even more superchargers and even more solid options for those 1% of 1% of trips that it won't suffice for.
Meantime, Tesla owners already spend less time than gas car owners fueling their cars, because it happens while they sleep. They don't need a mechanical solution because it's already solved.
Mazda is working on a model with a range extender. BMW just took them out of their models, but they’re not quite the same segment.
Until they focused too much on where the puck was and not enough on where the puck is going to be.
Toyota OWNED the hybrid market. They are barely part of the EV market now.
Isn't the range of a Tesla already well over that? What holds you back if your range is only 200 miles? You can charge at home can't you?
people regularly drive to cities which is like 300-400 miles round trip. They need to pull 1 ton in a truck. There’s snow on the road and no charging station, do you want to freeze?
I’m not saying we won’t get there, just saying right now hybrids (which I actually own) are the only real option for people outside of a metropolitan area (or if they just want to drive local, which is fine). Pacifica hybrids are great, they have 30 mile full battery power. Then switch to gas. I drive locally 90% is the time, but can still drive to the closest major city 160 miles away
A second ago you only needed 100-200 miles a day?
> Many of us like the idea of EV, but also drive 100-200 miles a day.
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Towing a boat uphill the whole way.
This was / is common in my area. My point is that a Tesla works well in many cases, particularly in densely populated regions. They work less well if you have to drive distances, carry a heavy load, and especially not if it’s more rugged. All the more true if you have kids, particularly young ones where a 20 min charging break is rough. Or running out of charge could be a problem.
Hybrids are really much better suited to these scenarios. I think EVs will get there, they’re always closing gaps, just right now less densely populated areas make less sense.
As a Bay Area resident, let me tell you: I have driven all over California and there are Tesla’s meeting me at each spot. You’re in the past with this take.
Like I said, we will get there. It’s really not there yet. I too lived in the Bay and regularly went down to San Diego. Much easier to do if you’re willing to take a couple 20 min breaks on the way (pretty normal). There are charging stations though. It’s always warm, roads are flat, etc
All I was saying is Tesla is good for what it is. It’s not well suited (today) for country or even some suburbs. For those instances hybrids are a better fit
When I was in Alabama, I drove across Alabama to Florida and back in an evening. A Tesla could handle that no problem. 300 miles is a long range...
They have a fully sorted fuel cell vehicle in the Mirai, based upon technology that is no more expensive to produce than an ICE.
They are late to the game on EV's, but the entire market is still in its early days.
You can bet that once the battery technology becomes cheap enough to stuff into cars with Corolla price tags, Toyota will be doing it, and they will be the #1 seller of EV's in terms of sales volume.
Maybe. But you are assuming the cost of battery technology will be the same for everyone. Currently it seems like Tesla is about 3-5 years ahead of everyone in terms of price & performance. What happens if/ when[1] Tesla launches an EV at Corolla prices and Toyota is still waiting for battery prices to come down?
I think it's far more likely at this point that Tesla will have a $25k EV in the next 5 years than Toyota.
If you want to do a road trip in an EV Tesla is often the best/only option.
EVs were not viable until battery technology improved enough. Batteries have been improving about 7%/year. Based on those figures from the 1990s and an estimate of minimum acceleration, range, and recharge time to be acceptable on the road, EVs were predicted to become viable for the mass market around 2020.
Guess what. Those trends held and EVs became viable for the mass market around 2020. :-)
Before either hybrids or EVs were commercially viable, The Innovator's Dilemma included a case study done for the car industry on the switch to electric. The case study concluded that, based on the history of disruptive innovation, the requirements of driving, and the trends in batteries, electric vehicles would become economically viable around 2020. It also concluded that traditional manufacturers would pursue hybrids but would have trouble moving into the EV market.
As a prior correlated example, shortly before steam became competitive for trans-oceanic travel, sailboat manufacturers briefly produced hybrid sail/steam ships. In so doing they made acceptable compromises to sail to allow for the reliability of steam near land. However none of the companies that did that survived into the steamship era.
In fact every detail of that case study has happened as predicted except that they predicted that EVs would start at the bottom of the market and move up, while Tesla started at the top and moved down. However the jury is still out on who will wind up winning the EV market - Tesla or one of the Chinese or Indian manufacturers who produce low-end EVs in higher quantity than Tesla. If it is China or India, then that case study will work out in every detail.
But the point remains. Designing an electric engine whose job is to be a boost to a gasoline engine, compromising both power and range, is not on a natural technological path to a pure electric vehicle. And history suggests that companies that go that route will have trouble when pressure comes to switch to the more natural technology.
Therefore Toyota's migration to hybrids is not only not a move to EVs, but it was both predicted and is suggestive that they would have trouble moving to pure EVs.
> Tesla or one of the Chinese or Indian manufacturers who produce low-end EVs in higher quantity than Tesla
I don't see Tesla ever becoming a gargantuan multinational carmaker giant like Toyota or GM - it's just not in their corporate ethos. I compare Tesla to Apple: they're technological leaders who set the benchmarks (and own the patents) but who also keep a relatively small and simple product matrix. There's loads of computer form-factors that Apple doesn't produce products for (e.g. rugged laptops, industrial control computers, "affordable" computers, and so on) - the demand for these products which are typically lower-margin are met by other manufacturers and I see Tesla being fine with this: let Toyota, GM, etc stress over meeting demand for a sub-$30k BEV while making hardly any profit.
I think the importance of self-driving / autonomous cars should also be considered. GM has Cruise, but Toyota, Ford, Honda, etc are either uninterested for some reason, or hoping Google or Apple will license them their Waymo or Titan system, or playing catchup very, very slowly - given Tesla is looking like they'll make their FSD an open-beta this year (and a public 1.0 release before the year's end, I hope!) that further widens their moat and with their current (overinflated, I admit) valuation that could see them buy-out a smaller carmarker to cement themselves should anything detrimental happen in the medium-term.
And the vision of becoming that is not exactly new. See https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j... for Elon Musk laying out that plan back in 2006.
And he's been sticking to the roadmap. For example that blog post was the first public announcement that they would eventually produce a family sedan called the Model 3. And indeed they eventually produced a family sedan..and called it the Model 3.
Oh wow, I never saw that, but that's exactly what I saw they were doing and now everything makes sense.
Given they've been literally telegraphing their moves right-up-until the decision to do self-driving tech, I'm surprised bigger automakers haven't reacted at all until now, at which point they're lagging so far behind it's just depressing.
As an aside, being able to do this kind of thing is one of the very few alleged benefits of Brexit. Will be interesting to see if they can actually execute on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400725
The article makes a lot of claims (500km, 10 minute charge from 0-100%, reduced battery size/footprint) but it doesn't back up those claims or even say who is claiming them. Is it Toyota? A manufacturing partner? "people familiar with the matter"? The authors themselves based on general industry knowledge?